12/06/20: As the year is coming to a close, many Empowering Youth and Families Program (EYFP) counties are getting in a last session before the holidays. In Onslow County, they held session B of the Powerful Families curriculum through a Zoom meeting. The session opened with Lee Stiles, the Onslow EYFP Program Assistant (PA) welcoming the families and giving an overview of the night’s activities. After that, youth and caregivers split off into their separate groups as normal. For the youth session, they started by playing charades which the youth had a lot of fun doing. They had to act out activities they would do throughout the day which lead into the main topic of the session: how to respond to stressful situations. There was a discussion comparing and contrasting stressful versus positive responses to stress. The facilitators taught the youth about Reflexive Listening techniques and acted out how to practice it. For the caregiver session, they started off chatting about how the culture of their youth is very different from the culture they grew up with, and all the caregivers agreed that youth face a bombardment of stressors born of modern culture such as social media. As they did with the youth, facilitators presented the method of Reflexive Listening to caregivers as a way of better communicating with their youth and helping the youth to feel that their feelings are validated. The group then practiced what they had learned with some roleplay scenarios. The caregivers were very engaged throughout the session with one stating that these new techniques would help her communicate with her youth “a whole lot better.” At the end of the night, everyone came back together to learn what was “assigned” for the family session. Staff and families of Onslow County EYFP alike agreed that the session was a good one.
Original blog post:
